55 Fun Facts About Machu Picchu

Machu Picchu is located in which South American country?

Peru holds the ruins on the eastern slopes of its Andes, where the mountains drop toward the Amazon, so they stand in tropical mountain forest; they are the country's most visited attraction.

How do most visitors reach Aguas Calientes, the town at the foot of Machu Picchu?

By train: no road reaches Aguas Calientes, so almost every visitor rides the rails through the river gorge and the rest arrive on foot.

What originally covered the roofs of Machu Picchu's stone buildings?

Thatched grass: roofs of wood and thatch once topped the walls, and when they perished only the roofless stone shells were left.

Which river loops around Machu Picchu on three sides, far below the ridge?

The Urubamba, still revered as a sacred river, nearly encircles the ridge; some scholars think that embrace is part of why the Incas chose the spot.

What does the name Machu Picchu mean in Quechua?

Old peak is the usual translation: machu means 'old' or 'old man' and pikchu 'peak'; a 2021 study argues the Incas themselves knew the town by another name, one meaning 'young peak'.

Which Inca emperor, who launched the empire's great expansion in the mid-1400s, is believed to have had Machu Picchu built?

Pachacuti seized power around 1438 and began the conquests that built the empire; the Incas left no writing, so the link to him rests on Spanish colonial documents and the site's dating.

What do most archaeologists now think Machu Picchu was built to be?

A seasonal royal retreat: early theories made it a convent of chosen women or a fortress, but it has no real defences and the court seems to have used it for only part of the year.

A 2021 study found Machu Picchu was in use decades earlier than colonial records implied; which technique dated its skeletons?

Radiocarbon dating of bones and teeth from 26 burials showed the site in use by about 1420, nearly two decades before the chronicles say its builder even took power.

Machu Picchu has only about 200 buildings; roughly how many people are thought to have lived there in its heyday?

About 750 is the usual estimate: the famed 'lost city' was closer to a village, staffed mostly by servants and at its fullest in the dry season.

What do studies of skeletal remains suggest about the people who lived at Machu Picchu?

Immigrants from many regions: DNA from more than 30 burials showed coastal, highland and Amazonian ancestry, because the staff were servants drawn from lands the empire had conquered.

Which animals account for most of the animal bones found at Machu Picchu?

Llamas and alpacas belong to the high grasslands far above the forested ridge, so the herds, or their meat and hides, must have been brought down to the site.

Machu Picchu's stepped farming terraces are known by which Spanish word?

Andenes is Spanish, not an Inca word: an andén is also a railway platform, and in the Andes it came to mean the stepped fields that still hold the mountainside in place.

Why were Machu Picchu's terraces engineered for drainage rather than irrigation?

Annual rainfall exceeds 1,800 mm, so each terrace was built as a filter, with topsoil over sandy gravel over stone chips, letting the downpours sink away instead of washing the slope off.

A Machu Picchu temple takes its name from a carved rock shaped like which bird with outstretched wings?

The condor: the carved rock is read as the bird's head and the stones behind it as spread wings, and the temple is thought to have been a place of animal sacrifice.

Where did the 1912 excavators find most of Machu Picchu's dead?

In caves around the site's edge: some 174 people lay in shallow chambers under boulders and overhangs, and they are read as the site's servants, not its nobles.

What did Hiram Bingham find written on a Machu Picchu temple wall in 1911?

A name and '1902': a local man, Agustín Lizárraga, had climbed up with companions nine years before the 'discovery', and the writing is said to have been erased later on Bingham's orders.

Which Chilean poet wrote the long poem 'The Heights of Macchu Picchu'?

Pablo Neruda admired the stonework but gave his poem to the nameless labourers who raised it, calling on the dead builders to rise and speak through him.

Who led Hiram Bingham along the last stretch into Machu Picchu's ruins in July 1911?

A farmer's young son: two families were still farming the old terraces, and one of their boys, about eleven, walked the visitor along the ridge to the overgrown ruins.

What was Bingham's 1911 expedition primarily searching for?

The lost capital of the Neo-Inca state was Vilcabamba, where the last rulers held out for decades; he walked through its jungle-covered ruins that same year, dismissed them, and gave Machu Picchu the title instead.

Bingham compared his 'discovery' of Machu Picchu to whose 'discovery' of America?

Columbus: in a 1922 letter he granted that others had reached the ruins first, as Norsemen had reached America, but argued that he was the one who made them known to the world.

Which magazine made Machu Picchu world famous with Hiram Bingham's report in 1913?

National Geographic ran his account in 1913, and its parent society helped pay for the return expeditions that cleared and excavated the ruins.

A ceremonial Inca knife dug up at Machu Picchu in 1912 is the earliest known object made with which alloy?

Bismuth bronze: the knife's handle is about 18 per cent bismuth, apparently the first time smiths added it to bronze on purpose, and it gave the casting an unusually pale colour.

Which American university kept thousands of Machu Picchu artefacts for nearly a century before agreeing to send them home?

Yale took the finds on condition that the government could ask for them back, then held on until a 2008 lawsuit, street protests in Lima and an appeal to President Obama; they are now in Cusco.

What career did Hiram Bingham take up after his Machu Picchu expeditions ended in 1915?

Politics: elected governor of Connecticut in 1924, he was sworn in and resigned the very next day, because in the meantime he had also won a seat in the US Senate.

What fed the chain of 16 stone fountains that stepped down through Machu Picchu?

A mountain spring: a stone canal carried its water to the top of the town, where it fell from one fountain to the next, and flowing water seems to have been sacred to the Incas as well as useful.

The Intihuatana stone's name, probably applied by Bingham, means what in Quechua?

Place where the sun is tied: Bingham borrowed the name from similar carved rocks at other Inca sites, so it may not be what the Incas called this one, and what the rock was for is still argued over.

What is unusual about the main wall of Machu Picchu's Temple of the Sun?

It is curved, a rarity in Inca building: the semicircular wall wraps around a natural boulder that may have served as an altar, much like the great sun temple in Cusco.

Which of these did the builders of Machu Picchu have to manage without?

The wheel: the Incas raised the town with no wheels and no iron or steel tools, which is why the engineers who study its stonework today call it a marvel.

Why did Machu Picchu escape the looting and demolition invaders brought to other Inca sites?

They never found it: no colonial chronicle describes the place, so its walls were still largely intact when outsiders finally arrived some four centuries later.

What is the characteristic shape of Inca doors and windows at Machu Picchu?

Trapezoidal openings, wider at the foot than the head, repeat the walls themselves, which lean inward as they rise; that slope and the interlocking blocks have carried the buildings through 500 years of earthquakes.

What holds the precisely cut stones of Machu Picchu's main buildings together?

Nothing — they are fitted without mortar and held by their own weight, so closely that a knife blade will not slide between them; the builders knew mortar and used it, but only on a few minor structures.

Why, one geologist argues, did the Incas site Machu Picchu where earthquake faults cross?

Fractured rock there gave ready building stone: blocks already cracked along planes of weakness took far less effort to shape, and his 2019 study found Cusco and other Inca towns sited on crossing faults too.

Which hard rock, quarried on the spot for the walls, forms the bedrock beneath Machu Picchu?

Granite, one of the hardest building stones, was quarried on the ridge itself; the masons pounded it into shape with harder hammerstones and are thought to have ground the faces smooth with sand.

Why did most of Machu Picchu's food have to be carried in from outside?

Its fields were too small: the terraces grew maize and perhaps potatoes, but far too little to feed the town, and engineers see them chiefly as a way of stopping the ridge from sliding.

What is the name of the gateway through which the Inca Trail arrives above Machu Picchu?

The Sun Gate, Inti Punku in Quechua, stands on the ridge above the town; trekkers set off in the dark on their final morning to reach it for a first view of the ruins below.

What is the highest point on the Classic Inca Trail, at about 4,200 metres, known as in English?

Dead Woman's Pass, Warmi Wañusqa in Quechua, records no tragedy: seen from the valley, the crest is said to look like a woman lying face up.

Which sugarloaf summit towers behind the ruins in the classic postcard view of Machu Picchu?

Huayna Picchu is no mere backdrop: the Incas cut a stairway up its sheer flank and built terraces and a small retreat near the top, a climb that visitors can still make today.

On what kind of day does the sunrise shine straight through a window of Machu Picchu's Temple of the Sun?

A solstice: at sunrise that day a beam passes through the window and lines up with the carved rock inside, which suggests the tower served for watching the sky as well as for worship.

What does the name of Aguas Calientes, the town below the ruins, mean?

Its station, Puente Ruinas, receives the tourist train from Cusco every morning; a bus then climbs 8.6 km to the entrance.

How was Machu Picchu named one of the New Seven Wonders in 2007?

By public vote, cast online and by text message with nothing to stop people voting again and again; UNESCO pointedly kept its distance from the Swiss foundation's campaign.

What has UNESCO repeatedly threatened over crowding at Machu Picchu?

A danger listing, a place on the roll of World Heritage Sites under threat, has hung over the ruins since the 2000s, yet the government has kept raising the daily cap, to as many as 5,600 in the 2024 high season.

In October 2020, late in its pandemic closure, Machu Picchu opened specially for whom?

One stranded Japanese tourist: he arrived in March 2020 just as the site shut, waited almost seven months in the town below, and was finally let in alone by special permission from the government.

The treasure hunter Charlton Heston played in 'Secret of the Incas', set at Machu Picchu, inspired the look of which screen hero?

Indiana Jones owes his fedora and leather jacket partly to Heston's fortune hunter: the costume designer on Raiders of the Lost Ark said her crew watched the old film together several times.

In which 2004 film does the young Ernesto Guevara explore Machu Picchu?

The Motorcycle Diaries retraces the 1952 journey a young medical student made across South America before he became a revolutionary; among the ruins he broods on the lost world of the people who built them.

Machu Picchu's village is twinned with Haworth in Yorkshire, famous as whose home?

The Brontë sisters: their moorland village of Haworth signed a formal twinning agreement with Machu Picchu's village in 2005 and marked the occasion with an evening of Andean music.

Which shy animal of the cloud forest around Machu Picchu is the only bear native to South America?

The spectacled bear, named for the pale rings around its eyes, is the continent's only bear: a shy, mostly vegetarian tree-climber and one of the threatened species the sanctuary around the ruins protects.

Machu Picchu emptied within about a century of being built; what do most historians blame?

The Spanish conquest: invasion and the plagues that came with it toppled the empire that built the place, and some scholars think smallpox killed many of the residents outright.

Which 2023 blockbuster shot sequences at Machu Picchu and other Cusco sites?

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is partly set in the Andes, and its makers won a rare chance to shoot among the ruins in 2021, when the pandemic had thinned the usual crowds.

What cut off Machu Picchu in early 2010 and trapped thousands of visitors?

Floods: mudslides severed the only route in, so some 4,000 visitors were stuck in the town below until helicopters began flying them out, and the ruins stayed closed for two months.

In 2000 a camera crew chipped Machu Picchu's Intihuatana stone while shooting what?

A beer commercial: a crane brought in for the shoot struck the carved pillar and broke a chip from it.

Which bright red-orange bird, found in the forest below Machu Picchu, is the country's national bird?

The Andean cock-of-the-rock: the male's disk-shaped crest all but hides his beak, and males gather in noisy groups in the forest to bow, bob and hop for the watching females.

Which 1972 Werner Herzog film opens with scenes shot around Machu Picchu?

Aguirre, the Wrath of God opens with a column of conquistadors filing down a steep mountain stairway in the mist, shot beside the ruins before the production moved down to the jungle rivers.

The classic Inca Trail shuts for a month each year at the height of the rainy season; which month?

February: the trail shuts for the whole month so crews can clear the rubbish a year of trekkers leaves behind, right in the wettest stretch of the year.

One of Hiram Bingham's theories about Machu Picchu collapsed because his team had misjudged what about its skeletons?

Their sex: he believed most of the dead were women and imagined a convent of 'Virgins of the Sun', but later study of the bones found men and women in roughly equal numbers.

A cliff path into Machu Picchu crosses a gap spanned only by loose tree trunks; what was the gap for?

Controlling who got in: with the trunks pulled back, a sheer drop cut the path in two, so this back route worked like a drawbridge and strangers could be kept out.